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On December 7, 2006, a new jail opened in Guantánamo. It was, and is, called Camp 6. Guantánamo is located at the arid eastern end of Cuba, plagued with iguanas and surrounded by the endless indigo desert of the Caribbean. The detention center there, opened in 2002, had always been a provisional thing, defined by its infinities of razor wire and its guard-towered skyline. Camp 6 was different. Built by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root to duplicate a jail in southeastern Michigan, it was made of concrete as gray as wastewater, and its facade was not only windowless but featureless, a dungeon for an era of diminished expectations. Camp 6 was built for permanence, and by the time the first detainees walked through its iron doors, it was a maximum-security memorial to American prerogative. The detainees who were held in Camp 6 were the ones whose fates were both open-ended and predetermined, the ones who would not be charged, not be tried, and, most important, not be freed. They would stay, extrajudicial guests, until the cessation of hostilities in a war with no end, or until America elected a president who decided that a policy of preventive detention presented a risk to his country greater than the risk of dangerous men going free.

Oh yeah, and something else happened on December 7, 2006: David Iglesias, the United States attorney for New Mexico, got fired.

"I do my fair share of public speaking," David Iglesias says, "and as it turns out, I'm a favorite of liberal audiences." Of course he is. When he and seven other federal prosecutors were asked to resign from Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department for insufficient zeal in the prosecution of Democrats or for failing to protect Republicans from indictment, he became the face of what came to be called the "U. S. Attorneys Firing Scandal." He was a conservative, a Hispanic, a Navy reservist, and, in his words, a "professing Christian" — "You're literally, for the Republicans, like a truffle!" crowed Jon Stewart when Iglesias appeared on The Daily Show — and the very things that made him attractive to Republicans when they were facilitating his career made him lethal when they were trying to end it. In congressional testimony, as well as in interview after interview, Iglesias struck just the right note of wounded honor to enable him to help turn what the Bush administration tried to pass off as a "personnel matter" into a full-blown crisis over the rule of law. Alberto Gonzales had to resign, and subpoenas followed Harriet Miers and Karl Rove out of the White House. Even now, there is a special prosecutor assigned to the scandal and the possibility that obstruction-of-justice charges will be filed against its once-untouchable architects. Even now, many Republicans won't shake Iglesias's hand, which means that even now many Democrats will line up for the privilege. Federal prosecutor? Evangelical Christian? Military man? Sure! If you're a liberal, what's there not to like about David Iglesias?

As it turns out, there is one thing. "I usually speak about rule-of-law issues at bar associations, and they love that," Iglesias says. "But when they hear what I'm doing now, that's when they ask, 'How can you do that? Why would you want to?' "

What Iglesias is doing right now, you see, is putting the moral prestige he accumulated in his defiance of the Bush White House at the service of what will turn out to be the Bush White House's most challenging and enduring legacy. What he is doing right now is prosecuting accused terrorists as an attorney in the military commissions at Guantánamo.

There are a couple things you ought to know about Captain David Iglesias before you meet him. The first is that he is a frank and honest man. The second is that very often he can't tell the truth. Sometimes it's against the rules, as when he can't disclose the location of his office outside Washington, D. C., or tell you what cases he's working on. And then sometimes — most of the time — he just doesn't know. See, the Obama administration is in the middle of reviewing the military commissions, with an eye toward trying as many Gitmo detainees as possible in civilian courts. Congress is in the middle of rewriting the latest iteration of the Military Commissions Act. Teams dispatched by the Justice Department from four U. S. attorneys' offices (for the record, Western New York, Eastern New York, Washington, D. C., and Eastern Virginia) are reviewing the individual cases of each Gitmo detainee likely to be prosecuted rather than released, including the cases Iglesias has been assigned. Iglesias doesn't know if the military commissions will be abolished. He doesn't know if his cases will be taken away from him. He doesn't know what will happen if he tries his cases and loses. He doesn't even know who's in charge, which, as a Navy captain, drives him crazy. "Is it the president?" he says. "I guess so, but he's got bigger things on his table. Is it the Attorney General? Is it the Secretary of Defense?" He wants to make clear that he's speaking for himself here, not the Defense Department. He doesn't know shit, really, because each time he thinks he knows something, or is about to know, there's a continuance, or another review, and what he winds up knowing is that he's in the dark, his fate in someone else's hands. But then, he says, "I've been living in a state of ambiguity for the last three years, so this is nothing new."

The irony is that Iglesias is the least ambiguous of men, not to mention the least ironic. He is fifty-one years old, square-jawed and square-shouldered. His broad face is the color of winter leaf, and his regulation-cut hair is jet-black. His eyes are very dark and unblinkingly resolute, capable of masking the difference between his deep reserves of patience and his deeper reserves of will, and then, when his patience is exhausted, capable of a flat, dead stare. He has a handshake of a voice, slightly tenory but always brisk and forthright. He will consider questions again and again, until he returns to the original answer. He is one of those men inclined to certainty and simplicity by temperament, by training, by history, and then by choice. He is the son of missionaries. His mother is German, his father a Kuna Indian, which makes him like Rambo — good warrior stock, with roots in an unconquered tribe. He grew up on an island off Panama, speaking Spanish and English, with no electricity or running water. He was a stutterer, and there is something in his speech, a meticulousness, that reveals the effort behind it, that makes him sound as though when he's speaking the everyday English of small talk and chatter, he's speaking a second language. His first language — the language that delivered his tongue back to him — is the language of the law, which in his mouth is not the language of shaded and elusive meanings but rather the language of dead certainties. It's what made him a prosecutor rather than a defense attorney. It's what made him, in the words of too many commentators to count, a "loyal Republican." It's what made him view his job as U. S. attorney as a domestic adjunct to George Bush's War on Terror, with emphasis on homeland security through border control. And it's what makes the uncertainty — the doubt and disillusion and dismay — he's had to wear since his firing so ill fitting, even though it's provided the necessary margin between thinking of himself as a fallen Republican and thinking of himself as a fallen man.

"I believe in right and wrong," Iglesias says. "I believe in good and evil. I believe that we are the good guys, and they" — in this case, the accused terrorists he's prosecuting — "are the bad guys. And yet I live in a state of ambiguity. I've gone from a bright-line-drawn-between-black-and-white world to a world of innumerable shades of gray. But I think you can learn from both. I was comfortable in the black-and-white world, but it was wrested from my control. So I'm living in a different world now. Fortunately, I'm very adaptable, which the military rewards."

So now he's in Guantánamo. Rather, he's back in Guantánamo, for Gitmo is where he started his circuitous career as a famously straight arrow. He was twenty-eight when he went the first time, a lieutenant in the Navy's JAG — Judge Advocate General's — Corps. In one of his first cases, he wound up defending an enlistee charged in the brutal hazing incident that served as the inspiration for Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. He was, he clarifies, one of three JAG lawyers who served as the model for the character played in the movie by Tom Cruise as a young man whose moral idealism finally trumps his moral naivete — and who is told that he can't handle the truth. Iglesias thought he could. For twenty-eight years as a Republican loyalist, he thought he was handling the truth. Then he got a big dose of it, in a phone call truncated by the Republican need not only to render judgment but to make all judgments final. "David, the administration wants to go a different way," the triggerman for the Justice Department told him that December. "We would like your resignation, effective the end of January." And that was all. He was living one kind of life, then he was living another. That the second life has ended up where the first life began — that a predicament routinely described as Kafkaesque has brought David Iglesias to reckon with the most genuinely Kafkaesque problem this country has ever created for itself — is not just an irony but rather an inevitability, an exacting symmetry that connects the Bush administration to the Obama administration in ways that neither would welcome.

He had to find some kind of faith, after all, once his faith was broken. He did not want to end up, he says, a "jaded and cynical former prosecutor who dies thinking that everyone has an angle." He wanted, he says, "to make a difference. I made a difference when I helped clean up the Justice Department, but that was inadvertent." So when the Navy sent out a mass e-mail to JAG reservists in the hope of finding somebody to work for the military commissions in Guantánamo, Iglesias responded. He volunteered, interviewed, got the job, and was mobilized as an active-duty Navy captain in October 2008. He kept the mobilization secret, however, for as long as George Bush was president. He had very real enemies within and without the administration, and he was sure they would sandbag him if they had the chance. He went public with news of his new job only after Barack Obama was inaugurated president, and went to work. Now he waits for the Obama administration to declare whether he will be allowed to continue working, whether the legal apparatus created by the Bush administration to try and — most important — convict the "enemy combatants" detained at Guantánamo is legal, useful, and necessary. And his faith now is simply this: It will. His faith is that the Obama administration will realize that there is no alternative to the system already in place for the prosecution of terrorists, and that he will get to try his cases. If that sounds like the faith of a man resigned to the fact that his destiny is in the hands of other men — the small faith of a small man, perhaps even the broken faith of a broken man — consider what Iglesias was looking for when he went to Guantánamo. It wasn't redemption, exactly. You can't be redeemed when you've done nothing wrong. No, it was something else, something much larger and much less certain — the chance to be a redeemer.

There were, at one time, nearly 800 men detained at the prison camp in Guantánamo. All but 223 have been released, returned to their native countries or scattered to countries prevailed upon to take them; all but approximately 65 of those will follow that motley diaspora once the Obama administration reviews their cases. As for the 65: They are the irreducible remainder. They will either be tried in civilian courts, tried by military commission, or, as Iglesias says, "not tried and not released, because they are too dangerous."

Fifteen, including five alleged or admitted 9/11 plotters, have already been charged with war crimes by the military commissions put in place by George Bush; Iglesias is working on the cases of four who have not. He is the lead prosecutor on two, and one of those, he says, "is so undeveloped that even people who have been on the commissions for years don't know very much about it." That leaves one case. One out of almost eight hundred: And yet when you meet David Iglesias, the first thing he talks about is the difficulty and complexity of his task, which is the task of American justice. "I want to make it absolutely clear that this is different from any case I've ever worked on. This is an alternative universe we're living in." In his first life, he started his prosecutions with a crime scene. Now he starts with a battlefield. In his first life, he knew he could make his case when he solved the mystery of motive. Now the motive is so obvious — "to kill as many Americans as possible" — that it's irrelevant. In his first life, he either had enough evidence to convict or he didn't; either way, "there was always a knowable amount of information." Now the amount of information is unknowable, because it approaches a totality. He gets intelligence from six different agencies, in mad and sometimes competing accruals. He gets documents by the thousand, and words by the million. He gets evidence in the form of "data," so that most of what he reads is "chatter, mere verbiage." He knows everything about his subject, which means that he knows nothing. And when he does find out something, he has to ask the intelligence agencies if he can use it. "I don't own my own intelligence," he says. "The intelligence agencies do."

For all the difficulties presented by the infinity of evidence, however, the greatest difficulty Iglesias or any prosecutor will face is the question of how the evidence was gathered. "I was responsible for twelve thousand prosecutions as a U. S. attorney," Iglesias says. "There were never any allegations of torture. Here there are, and it's an incredible taint." It sure is. The case that the Justice Department wants to prosecute in civilian court more than any other is the case of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But KSM, as he is known, has been waterboarded 183 times, and as Iglesias says, "I don't know if you've ever seen waterboarding, but it's torture." The Justice Department is trying to draw from a poisoned well, which is why KSM has already been charged with war crimes by the military commissions, and why Iglesias thinks that he will stay there. Because here are the alternatives: The government takes a guilty plea from KSM and puts him to death without trial. The government keeps him detained without trial in perpetuity. Or the government puts him on trial in the federal courthouse in downtown New York and risks his acquittal on the issue of torture. There are no alternatives to the military commissions, so far as Iglesias is concerned, and that's why he has faith that he will ultimately get to try his case — that it's simply "implausible" that civilian prosecutors and civilian courts will be able to rise to the challenge not only of terrorism but of what we've done to the terrorists. Sure, it's a negative faith: We're going to keep the military commissions because we're stuck with the military commissions. And it would sound like an admission of defeat if it didn't also mean we are stuck with David Iglesias.

As it turned out, Karl Rove fired exactly the wrong guy when he fired Iglesias. Not just because he fired a guy who had done nothing wrong, but also because he fired a guy who believed that when you do nothing wrong, everything should go right. Rove and his henchmen in the Justice Department thought they could get away with the firings because they were firing true believers, and that belief would buy a cowed silence. They didn't realize that Iglesias's truest belief was in himself — that he believed in his personal ethics as fervently as he believed in his personal Jesus. He had confidence in his personal ethics, he relied on his personal ethics, and when he brought his personal ethics to bear in an ethical battle, he was freaking mighty, with just enough moral idealism, moral arrogance, and moral naivete to be dangerous.

Now he's brought his personal ethics to the military commissions in Guantánamo, the place our national ethics went to die. Let's face it: As designed by the Bush administration, the military commissions were created as a conviction machine for detainees subjected to harsh interrogations, if not outright torture. Indeed, the Supreme Court has already invalidated key provisions of

the Military Commissions Act. And yet the truest measure of the military commissions will be found not in their success but rather in the eventuality of their failure, because we, as a country, have decided that the only thing that disturbs us more than the prospect of terrorists being detained and tortured at Guantánamo is the prospect of terrorists actually leaving Guantánamo. And so we will try in civilian court the terrorists we think can be convicted in civilian court. We will try through the military commissions the terrorists we think can be convicted through military commissions. And the rest we will just, well, keep somewhere, even after Gitmo is closed. Just as the United States became a torturing nation under George Bush, it will become a nation that practices preventive detention under Barack Obama. You see, it's legal, David Iglesias says. "Under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, it's legal to keep enemy combatants until the cessation of hostilities..."

And yet he thinks it can be made right. He thinks that he can help make it right. What impresses him most about this country, he says, is its "ability to self-correct. We were in a broken state. We didn't stay in a broken state. The people cried out for new leadership, and they got it. We had leaders who didn't understand the rule of law. Now I'm convinced we do. I'm aware of the stigma attached to the military commissions. I'm aware that it's sort of like The Scarlet Letter, except that there's not a big A stamped on the military commissions, there's a big W. But I don't think that letter is indelible." Hell, if you ask Iglesias to describe his job at the military commissions, he doesn't even sound like a prosecutor. He sounds like a defense attorney: "Part of my job is to bring due process to the military commissions — and to make sure that true justice is obtained by the Gitmo detainees."

Now, you might call that moral naivete, or moral arrogance. You may call it the case of a guy who's shown himself willing to be used as a symbol before letting himself be used as a symbol again. You may call it a case of American exceptionalism showing once again its wounded face — a case of moral assertion being confused with a moral act. But really it's a statement of the essential American faith that lives in David Iglesias unbroken and unbowed: the faith that good men can redeem a bad system. And that he, David Iglesias, is a good man.